R&D INSIGHT
“A person using ‘Flow machine’ can decide to
compose blues in the style of Charlie Parker but to have all the notes different”
IN BRIEF
Air pollution big risk to public health
According to information released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in May, only 12% of the 1600 cities in its Urban Air Quality database comply with air quality guideline levels. WHO also found that roughly half of the urban population it monitors is being exposed to air pollution that is 2.5 times the level they recommend and estimated that outdoor air pollution was responsible for the deaths of 3.7 million people under the age of 60 in 2012. For more on air pollution see:
http://www.who.int/phe/health_ topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en/
Graphene’s electronic properties modified
Machines: the new composers?
F addictive melodies.
rench researcher Dr François Pachet has always been fascinated by the mystery of how great musicians manage to create iconic and Thanks
to his ERC
Advanced Grant, Pachet and his team are working on a software package, ‘FlowMachines’, which will help musicians or writers to explore the magic of creativity and compose new music. The idea behind the project is that when you
want to create something different, you need to invent your own style. “New things usually come from taking existing styles and adding a new element; a chord sequence, a new rhyme or a different
rhythm for instance,” explains
Pachet. ‘FlowMachines’ is a computer-based compositional tool that makes developing
www.projectsmagazine.eu.com
individual style easier. Working with sequential data, the tool produces a string of data to form a corpus. “We add into the corpus new ideas, which
we call constraints. It means that a person using the ‘Flow machine’ can decide to compose blues in the style of Charlie Parker but to have all the notes different,” says Pachet. Thanks to the ‘Flow machine’, the
constraints are added digitally and the user can quickly see the result and decide whether the musical phrase is what he had in mind. If it is not, they can alter the constraints.
The researcher concludes,
“The trick of this project, in a positive way, is to turn the creativity question into a mathematical problem.”
A Manchester University team led by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov has discovered a new way of modifying the electronic properties of graphene. This team has shown that when graphene is grown on a hexagonal substrate, a small change in its crystal structure causes a gap to open in the material’s electron energy band. Graphene grown in this way can also exist in an alternative structure with a much smaller band gap. This discovery could lead to new ways of controlling the electronic properties of graphene-based devices.
Schulz vows to tackle gender pay gap
Martin Schulz declared in his election programme that the gender pay gap would be a priority in the EU if he became the next president of the European Commission. “If my son gets a job, he gets 15% more salary than my daughter. This is a shame,” Schulz told a press conference in Brussels, “Addressing the gender pay gap, which is a dramatic one in Europe, should be an initiative of the next commission. It is a high priority,”
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